One Hundred and Four Horses

In the weeks and months to come, Pat and I would think long and hard about this moment. That we had not properly recognized the importance of the upcoming referendum would one day come to sadden us. Were we really living so separately, out here in the corner of Africa we had pioneered for ourselves, that we had blinded ourselves to the path our country was traveling?

After Pat had promised Charles the use of the farm vehicles to ship all our workers off to vote, he found me at the back of the farmhouse, wearily preparing crates of tomatoes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Did you know,” Pat began, “about this referendum?”

I knew about it, of course, but not in the same way as I knew about how low the water table was, or how weak our yields had been in the last harvest, or how quickly the bank interest was gathering on our cropping loan. The referendum was a thing that was happening somewhere out there. There were problems enough at Crofton to dominate the day.

“It’s tomorrow,” said Pat. “A whole new constitution.”

When he put it like that, it seemed suddenly to loom a lot larger in my mind. Behind us, in the darkness, the horses nickered in their stalls.

Things had become increasingly unstable in Zimbabwe over the past several years. We had thought things might improve once our drought years were over, but instead they seemed to get worse. Mugabe had been supporting the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, ostensibly sending troops to support the president there, but really hoping to be able to exploit the DRC’s mineral deposits in return—and, in response, the World Bank and various European countries had suspended all funding with Zimbabwe and placed various embargoes upon us. All this contributed to an economy rife with unrest—but nothing more so than when the government, under pressure from the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association, led by the aptly named Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, agreed to hand out massive payouts and pensions to all the association’s fifty thousand members. The Zimbabwean dollar had plummeted in value; inflation had soared, with a loaf of bread leaping in price from seventy cents to more than ten dollars; and the first voices of political opposition had begun to be heard.

“Are you worried?” I asked.

A wind lifted the tobacco and ghosted across us, bringing on it a fragrant scent.

“Not yet,” Pat whispered—but, as he turned back to the farmhouse, I wondered whether he believed it or not.

Chapter 4

THE REFERENDUM WAS lost.

The ­people had spoken. By a large margin, they rebutted Mugabe’s attempts at consolidating his power. They told him, in no uncertain terms, that they did not approve of his attempts to forcibly acquire land that was legally held. They told him they did not approve of him staying in power for endless terms and appointing a natural successor, like any warlord of old. They put their trust, instead, in a newly formed political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, which had been formed in the trade unions and was led by a man named Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC had been campaigning for a no vote in the referendum, and suddenly the ­people seemed to be able to voice their opposition to Mugabe.

But in the end, it was to mean nothing.

On the surface the outcome was good for farmers like Pat and me. Questions of government and land reform had simmered, just below the surface, ever since the bush war ended in 1980. We had spent our entire married lives with those unanswered questions lying in wait, just like the crocodiles down at the river, and perhaps Mugabe’s attempt at changing things was just another blip, just another one of those moments in which the crocodile surfaces to study the riverbank with cold, reptilian eyes.

It was only a few days, however, before we heard the first murmurs of discontent. The same War Veterans’ Association that had compelled the government to give unprecedented monetary handouts to its fifty thousand members, crippling the economy, had suddenly been mobilized. We heard stories of its members—some claiming to be veterans of the bush war in which Pat too had fought, even though they could not have been born at the time—amassing on the farms of white landowners, beating drums, chanting slogans, and confronting farmers and their families on the very steps of their homes. Already, some farmers had abandoned their farms out of fear for their children.

Charl and Tertia had always had trouble with itinerant poachers, as they were at the edge of a resettlement area, a former commercial farm that had been bought for redistribution to landless peasants. But after the referendum was lost, they began to see more and more settlers moving through Two Tree. Charl confided in Pat that he had found a note, skewered on a stick outside their farmhouse, instructing him that they would have to leave, that Two Tree and all its neighboring farms would soon revert to their “rightful owners.”

The referendum had been lost, but Mugabe could still exact his will.

It was early in the new millennium, and our oldest, Paul, had returned from studying at college in South Africa to help run the farm. We had been struggling at Crofton, a hangover from the droughts that had plagued us in the 1990s as we fought to open up the farm, and instead of returning here, he and Pat had leased some land at a farm between us and the town of Chinhoyi, a place called Palmerston Estates where we were growing yet more tomatoes. Jay, meanwhile, had taken up a hunting apprenticeship that took him all across the northwest region of Zimbabwe. Only Kate remained with us at Crofton, though often her brothers would return on the weekends to join her and run wild as they had done when they were small.

Soon after the referendum was lost, Jay returned to Crofton to spend the week with us. The whispers of what was happening on Zimbabwe’s farms had reached the hunting areas too, and Jay—who knew every inch of the land, in a way much deeper even than Pat and I did—was keen to know what was happening on our own farm. We told him of the settlers we had seen drifting through, the tension in the air on Two Tree, but it was not until Jay was about to leave us again that we had the first indication that we, as a family, were in the firing line as well.

Jay and Pat had been talking with Charl about the problems he was having with war vets at Two Tree. There was a sudden influx of settlers he had seen on his land from the nearby resettlement areas. Poaching was also getting out of hand as they moved over with their hunting dogs. As the afternoon waned, Charl, Pat, and Jay climbed back into the Land Rover to begin the slow crawl back to Crofton. Dusk was gathering, and the dying light set the bush to brilliant color: crimsons and reds burst through the wooded foliage; the red dirt tracks looked like licks of flames between fields of tall wheat.

Then, a gunshot cleaved the silence.

Pat and Jay immediately recognized the gunshot for what it was. A crack, like concentrated thunder, had split the air. Instinctively, Pat slammed his foot on the gas pedal. The Land Rover slewed wildly in the dust. Pat craned to look through the back windshield—but, all about, the farm seemed still. He wrestled with the wheel, brought the Land Rover back into line, and, with his foot still pressed hard to the floor, thundered back toward Crofton.

In the back, Jay reached instinctively for the shotgun hidden underneath the seat. He ducked at the window, the gun tight to his chest, keen eyes surveying the bushy koppie all around, in case he might see some figure lurking in the brush. Pat was proud to see how Jay reacted, so suddenly and so decisively. His months of training in Zimbabwe’s hunting areas seemed to have given him even more steel.

At the farmhouse, Kate and I were waiting. When the Land Rover appeared, kicking up clods of earth, we knew that something was wrong. Pat wrenched the vehicle around, and he and Jay tumbled out, their faces lined in a strange mixture of bewilderment and fury.

“What happened?” I asked.

Already, Jay was on his hands and knees, running his hands along the doors and rims of the Land Rover, as if searching for a tick in one of the horses’ flanks.

He looked up, eyes screwed shut as he squinted back the way they had come.

“Somebody shot at us,” Jay breathed.

I looked at Pat. “Shot at you?”

“From somewhere, up in the bush.”

I fell silent.

I breathed and said, “They’re already here, aren’t they?”

Without words, Pat nodded. Finally, he said, “There could be war vets”—he said it with a strange lilt, because really they were not war veterans at all, only thugs in Mugabe’s employ—“all over the farm and we just wouldn’t know it.”

“What’s happening here, Mum?” Jay had some of his father’s grit in his voice. It was a shock to understand, in that moment, how grown-up my second son had become.

I didn’t know how to respond, how to explain. There was so much to think about—how our nation had come to this, how we had found ourselves in such a perilous position, how we had walked blindly—even willingly—into such a confrontation. Issues of land reform in Britain’s old colonies were complex and often evoked great passions, as our neighbors in Kenya could testify to only too well. In the 1960s, they had gone through their own process of reform. In Zimbabwe, the interests of landowners had been protected in 1979 by the Lancaster House Agreement, which paved the way for the end of the bush war and Rhodesia’s transition to Zimbabwe. The agreement protected the rights of those who had owned, or been given, lands under the old government for ten years, guaranteeing that their land could be acquired by the government only on a willing seller, willing buyer basis—and that, even in those circumstances, adequate compensation would be paid. On top of this, before any farms were purchased or land bought to be opened up for agriculture, the government had the right to veto the sale, or else provide a certificate declaring it had “no objection” to the sale. It was in this climate that we had become the owners of our farm. We owned the land legally and legitimately. Yet, now, as I watched Jay run his hands across the bullet hole scored into the Land Rover, I felt a terrible foreboding: all of the old guarantees, on which we had built our lives, to which we had pledged our children’s futures, were already gone.

That night, we returned to Two Tree for dinner. In the farmhouse, Tertia poured us drinks. Like me, she didn’t seem to want to hear the conversation flowing at the other end of the table.

“It won’t come to that,” Pat said, his voice unfaltering. “It would be the end if they did. Agriculture’s all this country has …”

He had said the same as we rode to Two Tree, our eyes on the hills for fear of more shots. Zimbabwe was not a country rich in mineral resources like so many other nations in Africa. Our only real resource was the land itself: rich and verdant and fertile for farming. It was not for nothing that we were called the “breadbasket of Africa.” Ours was a country that did not go hungry, and one that could afford to pour grain and other crops into its neighboring nations. Without agriculture, we were nothing. The country’s economy was already in tatters; the idea that the government would exacerbate that by systematically destroying the agriculture on which it depended seemed, to Pat, absolute nonsense.

The way Charl was looking at Pat, I could tell he did not feel the same.

“It’s just not the way Mugabe’s thinking. Mugabe doesn’t think about the economy. It’s as if he still thinks there’s a war. He isn’t thinking about five, ten years … He isn’t thinking about next year, even. He’s”—Charl paused, as if weighing up the thought—“thinking about votes,” he concluded. “It isn’t even money. It’s power.”

If the reports we had heard were even fractionally true, Charl had a point. It wasn’t only the farms held by white landowners that were being targeted. Since the referendum was lost, thugs and soldiers in the government’s employ had stepped up their tactics against members of the MDC—and, perhaps more important, against those members of the electorate who had dared to voice opposition by voting with the MDC in the referendum. There was a parliamentary election on the horizon, too, and with the support the populace had shown for the MDC in the referendum, we expected the MDC to claim a record number of seats. The fact that Mugabe and his ZANU-PF government were reacting with such aggression could easily have been, as Charl contended, a deeply political move.

“It still doesn’t make sense,” Pat returned. “The economy is politics. The economy is the votes. If they ruin agriculture, they ruin it all. They’re not stupid. They have to see that.”

Lay waste to the economy, Pat argued, and they laid waste to their chances of winning even a single seat in the next election. It was, he said, 1960s politicking—but we were living, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century. To Pat, it was too preposterous to believe.

“It’s worse than that,” Charl added. “It’s … personal insult. He can’t understand why he lost. He still thinks he’s the liberator, the proud black hope … How could a country he saved not vote with him?” He paused. “He has to blame somebody for that. Why not us?”

As Charl and Pat became more deeply embroiled in their discussion of Mugabe’s strategy—if it was anything so clearly thought-out as a strategy—Tertia fussed around Resje and cupped a hand around her swollen belly. It would only be a few short weeks until her son, Charl-Emil, would be born. I could see it etched onto her face: she wanted him born into the Two Tree of three, four years ago, not into the place of constant apprehension that Two Tree was about to become.

I kept my eyes fixed on her face, heard Charl and Pat’s heated debate fade in and out, and felt the first twinge of a very real fear.

A few days later, before he returned to the hunting area to continue his apprenticeship, Jay reported seeing strangers in the bush. Saddling up Imprevu, Pat set out to investigate what Jay had seen: in the hills above the farm, where the bush was dense and men might remain hidden for days, huts made out of sticks had been hastily erected. Rings of black earth marked the places where campfires had been built, and the bush was thinned where men with pangas had taken to the trees. Pat and Imprevu made long circuits of the farm, moving in tightening circles, trying to scout out where the men were coming to settle and from which vantage points they could spy on our house.

I was glad to see Jay returning to his apprenticeship, and happier still when Kate could go back to school for the week. Though Paul and Jay had often been away at school for a term at a time, Kate was boarding during the weeks and returning to Crofton for her weekends—but, now, any time that she could spend away relieved a great welter of fear. Home had always been a place of safety for our children, a place to come and hide away from the world, but now it was beginning to feel as if they were better off staying far away. On Palmerston Estates, the situation was no better. Paul reported the same scraggly grass huts growing up near the railway crossing, with groups of ­people gathering around them, often drunk, seemingly stoned, raising their fists and chanting every time he rode along one of the winding farm tracks.

One morning, Pat, Kate, and I were eating breakfast in the Crofton dining room. The bright sun of early morning filtered through the curtains, and, as I helped Kate to eggs from a pan, Pat stood up to draw back the curtains.

On the grounds outside, twenty men were gathered, twenty stran­gers outside our gate.

If they did not look violent, if they were not drunk or stoned like the men we had been hearing about, they still inspired fear. Quickly, Pat pulled the curtains back into place. But it was too late; Kate had already seen.

Looking back, I believe that the only reason I did not panic was that I was thinking about Kate. For weeks now I had been making her do drills in how to respond if the war vets ever came to Crofton. She hated the drills—perhaps hated me for it too—but at least she was prepared. There was a hallway inside Crofton, a place with narrow walls that Jay and Kate had often made a game of shimmying up, one foot braced on either wall like mountaineers scaling a sheer crevice. If they got to the top of the passage, they could reach an attic crawl space there. It was in this hole that Kate was to hide should the worst ever happen. I turned to tell her to go, but before I could hustle her away, Pat was already striding out the farmhouse door.

Hanging back, I watched as Pat approached the men. This was not a baying horde of the type we had heard about. Pat stood, only yards away from them, and asked them what they were doing on the farm.

“It isn’t what we want to do, boss,” one of the men finally said. He shrugged, almost apologetically, and refused to meet Pat’s eyes. “But we’ve been told not to leave. They told us to make some noise. Shout a lot, cause some trouble …”

I ushered Kate back into the farmhouse, where she could not see. Outside, Pat continued to talk to the men. When, at last, he turned to come back inside, his face was set hard. I remembered how he had looked, all those years ago, as he walked into the brawl in the hotel bar, decked out in his ill-fitting suit and shoddy cowboy boots.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well,” was all he could reply.

It took some hours for the men to dissipate that day—but dissipate they did. Once they were gone, we ventured back out of the farmhouse. Their trails were clearly visible, as they had cut a path away from the farmhouse and back into the bush. Where they had come from, we did not know; why they were here was only too plain.

We were at Two Tree farmhouse with Charl and Tertia when we heard the news that the first white farmer had died. Charl and Tertia had had their own experience with war vets settling around their farmhouse—and though that crowd, like ours, had dissipated without violence, it had propelled Charl to thinking about their future. Tertia had just given birth to their son, baby Charl-Emil, and foremost in Charl’s mind was how he might protect his wife and children. Some farmers had already sent their families away, anticipating worse to come, and at Two Tree that day Charl admitted that he was thinking of doing the same—not just for his family, but for his horses as well.

Lady, Fleur, Grey, and the rest were loose in their paddock when we walked through the farm. Lady hurtled over as we approached, responding to the quiet burr of Charl’s voice. There was only one other animal that responded to him in the same way, an eland brought to Two Tree during the droughts. Em was perhaps the tamest of all wild creatures I had ever known. Fifty inches tall at her shoulder, with the eland’s two distinctive spiral horns, she seemed to have fallen in love with Charl. Whenever he was out on the farm, Em would somehow know where he was and canter over. Tertia was of the opinion that Charl, too, was a little bit in love with the eland. She had caught him, more than once, with Em’s head lying contentedly on his shoulder, Charl rubbing her gently between the eyes—and, whenever Tertia approached, Em would come to attention and push her aside, as if to say: Charl is mine; this is my time with him now.

“Where would you send them to?” I asked, my hands pressed against Grey’s flank.

“Do you know Rob Flanagan?”

I nodded. Rob Flanagan was a mutual friend, a horseman who also farmed outside Chinhoyi about thirty kilometers away. A polo player, he belonged to the same club where we would often go to watch matches. Charl had run into him only recently, at a farmers’ meeting in Chinhoyi. So far, Rob’s farm had not been affected by the roaming bands of war vets—and Charl, mindful that Two Tree was so close to the resettlement area, had begun to wonder: might there be room with Rob for some of his horses, if the worst came to the worst?

“There’s too many of them,” Charl said, looking into the distant bush where the war vets had begun to assemble their traditional huts. “And …”

Charl had cause to worry for his horses for, in the past, he had not spared the animals belonging to the men who came poaching on Two Tree land. Often, having chased the poachers away, he found himself compelled to shoot their dogs. It was a grisly business, for it was not the dogs’ fault that they were being used to kill game, but there was often no other choice. The idea of these men returning to Two Tree in force and meting out their revenge was all too easy to imagine.

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